news + art related events in or around nanopod

It’s been a week…

I can’t believe its been a week.
Trying hard to keep the aura of Iceland around me, near me.
Last night after midnight and I’d returned home from teaching, I got to work on my Rúgbrauð – hverabrauð recipe.
While traveling around Iceland with my friend Laura we practically lived off Rúgbrauð, Skyr, cheese and coffee! I must have tried every store bought brand of Rúgbrauð.. though that said, the in-store bakery/bread isles are generally packed full of steaming warm fresh baked Rúgbrauð and flatkokúr. Oh, we lived off flatkokúr too. 🙂

The image above is one of the last Rugbrauds I tried.
However one of my last meals in Reykjavik was at a vegetarian restaurant !

it was, ok. The best thing about the meal was the mint basil dressing on the salad!
Meanwhile, my Rúgbrauð slowly bakes. It’s been in the oven since 1am and will hopefully be amazing by 1pm! I’ll update the result.
I found a recipe online for ingredients, amounts, etc., then translated the ingredients off my favorite Rúgbrauð package. The online recipe called for white sugar and milk, the Icelandic brand used brown sugar and buttermilk 🙂 so, I purchased organic versions of everything. Here’s the basic recipe I used courtesy of Bibliophile’s Iceblog

Mix the ingredients together and knead well ***next try I will allow the dough to rise)

To cook in used milk-cartons:
Half-fill each 1 liter carton, pressing well to avoid air bubbles in the bread. Stand on the bottom of the oven and bake at 100°C for about 12 hours.

To cook in loaf pans: I am doing the loaf pan technique!
Press the dough into tins/bread pans and stand in an oven-pan, half-filled with boiling water. Bake as above, adding extra water whenever necessary. This method is called seyðing, which translates as “slow-boiling”.

One type of rúgbrauð is called hverabrauð, or “hot-spring-bread”. This is bread that has been cooked in a hot spring, or buried in sand/mud at the edge of a hot spring and allowed to cook there.
Hverabrauð (hv pronounced like Kfuh and the weird looking crossed d sounds like TH in the) is what I was eating in Iceland and had the super luck to have a freshly pulled out of the ground loaf while I was in Myvatn!!

Things I brought home.

Memories. Happiness. Huge great big happy!! I LOVE Iceland. While never in a million years did I ever think I would travel there, I had dreamt of and imagined such a place. It fills me. Like Taos new Mexico had felt so profoundly like home (a home I’d never had) Iceland held the same strange eeriness. Eerie because I don’t fully understand why or where the deep feelings of home are coming from. It’s extremely moving, deep, profound.
yep, I was and am inspired!! I’ve already purchased a flight back for Fall (shhhh.)

Wool! A trip to Iceland would not be complete without purchasing an Icelandic wool sweater, hat, gloves, or scarf. I bought gloves – wanted a sweater but already spent many kroners. 😉 I also bought wool to make something…

felting wool. They sold it by the kilo for something like $5cad and those raw skeins were like $2 each, selling by the kilo the woman told me 9 rolls equaled a kilo. The wool came from the Icelandic knitting association in Reykjavik.